Saskatoon Minute: Issue 129

Saskatoon Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Saskatoon politics

📅 This Week In Saskatoon: 📅

• On Wednesday, we're hosting a Pints & Politics event exploring why more Canadians are relying on food banks despite having access to an enormous food supply - and what it would take to move from managing food insecurity to preventing it. We'll be joined by our friends at the Saskatchewan Institute at 6:00 pm at Winston’s English Pub. You will find the link at the bottom of the email to join us for an important conversation with technology entrepreneur and community builder Jared Fedorchuk.
  
  
• The Civic Naming Committee will meet today at 10:00 am, and among the items on the agenda are proposed changes to the City's policy for naming civic property and development areas. The changes are the first step in implementing the Saskatoon Place Identity Framework, which City Council adopted in May 2025 and which calls for naming decisions to prioritize names from under-represented communities. Administration is recommending that a budget option to fund an annual public engagement process for generating new names be submitted to the 2028/2029 budget deliberations, and says implementation would not begin until that funding is approved. Developers consulted on the plan favoured a cheaper approach with only occasional engagement and raised concerns about the cost of the annual option. Administration is not proposing formal targets for the share of names drawn from under-represented groups, saying targets would require further research, engagement, and resources to develop and monitor. The naming program has no dedicated operating funding and is run by planning staff alongside their regular duties, with $156,816.86 remaining of the $375,000 capital budget approved in 2022 for the Legacy Review Project behind the Framework.
  
  
• The Municipal Heritage Advisory Committee will meet tomorrow at 11:30 am, and one of the items on the agenda is a recommendation to strip demolition protection from St. Mark's Anglican Church at 1406 8th Avenue North. The owners asked the City in June to remove the property from a bylaw that gives buildings with heritage value short-term protection from demolition, saying the church no longer serves as a place of worship and that restoring it to usable condition is not economically feasible. A heritage evaluation completed by City Staff this year concluded the property does not meet the threshold for designation as a Municipal Heritage Property, finding its significance limited and substantially compromised by deterioration and unsympathetic alterations. The church, built in 1939 for about $2,500 and seating 90 to 100 people, has no plumbing, is not connected to municipal water or sewer, and runs on a 60-amp electrical service, while a 2018 engineering report found the roof structure of the adjacent parish hall unsafe. Administration says the property has been marketed to congregations, private purchasers, and developers without any of them identifying a financially viable way to restore, relocate, or reuse it. The owners have offered to salvage items including the Celtic cross from the bell tower and a scroll listing those who served in World War II.
  
  
• The Board of Police Commissioners will meet on Thursday at 1:00 pm, and among the items on the agenda are the results of this year's public survey on policing and community safety. The Advanis Police Service Benchmarks study surveyed 561 Saskatoon residents aged 18 and over in May and June, and found that the share who would feel safe taking public transit fell to 46% from 61% a year earlier, a decline the pollster identifies as statistically significant. It also found that 75% of respondents believed crime had increased over the past five years, up from 66% in 2025, and that 42% said someone in their household had been the victim of personal, property, or financial crime in the past 12 months, up from 33%. Saskatoon Police Service says its own figures show total crime has grown 8% over the last five years. Confidence in the Service itself was unchanged, with 56% rating its overall job as excellent or good. Compared with similarly sized Canadian jurisdictions, Saskatoon respondents were 11 points more likely to report household victimization and 10 points more likely to feel unsafe walking alone after dark.
  
  
• The Saskatoon Environmental Advisory Committee will meet on Friday at 11:30 am, and one of the items on the agenda is a study putting a dollar value on the climate benefits of the city's natural areas. The study, paid for with $50,000 from the ClimateWest Adaptation in Action Program, measured carbon storage, carbon uptake, heat reduction, and avoided health care costs across the 295 hectares analyzed in the Northeast Swale and at the 13-hectare Briarwood Park. It calculated that the Swale returns a net benefit of $9,686 per hectare a year once maintenance is subtracted, rising to $12,625 by 2050, while Briarwood Park runs a net loss of $3,053 per hectare because maintaining it costs $12,919 per hectare a year. Most of the calculated value comes from carbon, priced using the federal social cost of carbon of $535 per tonne in 2025. The report notes that natural assets are not treated as tangible assets under public sector accounting rules and so do not appear in the City's financial statements, and it raises voluntary disclosure as something Saskatoon could adopt. An earlier City study estimated that all of Saskatoon's natural assets together provide at least $48 million in services a year. 

🚨 This Week’s Action Item: 🚨

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